Not the Tolkien story, but the discovery of Homo floresiensis occurred ten years ago. Nature has published a fascinating set of personal statements by the people involved, and you get a real sense of the drama of it all.
Brown: I smuggled some mustard seeds through customs for the purpose of measuring the volume of the brain. So I cleaned it all as carefully as I could. I turned it upside down, and I poured the seeds in it. I’d taken enough seeds to measure the size of a modern human brain, say 1.5 litres of seeds, but it only took about 400 millilitres. I was flabbergasted. The last time things with a brain that size walked was around about 2.5 million to 3 million years ago. It was not making any sense at all. I recorded it a second time, a third time. Mike and Thomas are looking at me and wondering why I’m going a bit pale. I was trying to push more seeds into the skull with my finger to try and increase the volume, because it was insane really.
Roberts: The carbon dates came in and they were around 18,000 years. So at that point it was, “Oh, this is absolutely bizarre.” This was a very primitive-looking human who was living this side of the last glacial maximum, this side of the last Ice Age.
Brown: If Mike had said he’d found evidence of an alien spaceship on Flores, I would have been less surprised.
But the end result is that the discovery reinforces a better picture of evolution: not linear, but branchy.
Roberts: We had such a nice simple story, where we had modern humans and Neanderthals, and we bumped them off, that was the end of Neanderthals. We ventured across southeast Asia and it was basically empty because Homo erectus had died out there already, and we sort of just wandered into Australia and there we go. It was a clean and almost crisp little story. It made nice sense. Everyone was happy with that. And then suddenly the hobbit pops its head up.
Brown: Now I’m more open to the idea that very small-bodied and small-brained bipeds moved out of Africa at a much earlier date, maybe 3 million years ago, or earlier. I’m more open to the idea that there were lots of failures in the evolution of bipeds. Some were successful, some weren’t. It’s a very branchy tree, and it just so happens we’ve survived.
didn’t carl sagan have a bit in cosmos where he showed that seeds are like the one thing you should never measure brain size with? precisely because you can either stuff as many as you can, or let them settle, to fit your preconceived notions about how big certain individual’s brains should be?
When I first heard Homo floresiensis had lived until only a few thousand years ago, I thought how sad that we can’t meet any living ‘hobbits’, but now that I remember how we have treated our fellow animal species, I think they were lucky to die out before meeting us.
I thought there was something a few months ago that the conclusion about H floresiensis is that it did not actually represent a new species but was instead a case of developmental disability in a modern human.
There have been repeated claims to this effect, naming a variety of pathologies. The latest, claims LB1, the individual whose skull was recovered, had Downs syndrome, while earlier claims had been for microcephaly and Laron syndrome. What an unfortunate individual! Those putting forward pathology-based hypotheses seem to be “multiregionalists”, who believe hominid evolution has always or nearly always involved just a single, widely distributed and rather variable species, marching shoulder-to-shoulder towards anatomical modernity. I suppose only a number of additional skulls of the same type would end the controversy, but my impression is that the “pathologists” are a fairly small minority among relevant experts.
But their shit did smell like roses.
He might have. Stephen Jay Gould, in The Mismeasure of Man certainly made that argument. However, he wasn’t talking about the difference between c.1.5 and c.0.4 litres, but the differences between modern skulls (and in particular, “European” (read: “white”) and “African” (read: “black”)). What differences there are are vastly less, and perhaps entirely within the range of normal variation for similar healthy individuals.
blf, that must be it. sagan, gould, and james burke – i spent my formative years watching their shows on pbs in the early 80s, and it’s been so long that i can’t always sort them out in my mind.
I’m not an anthropologist, but why did they need to risk the native environment of Flora by smuggling in plant seeds? Can’t you use any dry particle with a sufficiently small size?
~:-| There’s been agriculture on Flores for thousands of years…